What Does Leviticus 7:5 Mean?
And the priest shall burn them upon the altar as an offering of fire to the LORD. It is a trespass offering.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
And the priest shall burn them upon the altar for an offering made by fire unto the LORD: it is a trespass offering.THE KEY
The Hebrew name for the trespass offering holds guilt and the offering that answers it in the same word.
THE MEANING
Here, guilt is brought into a concrete act: the priest burns the designated portions on the altar as an offering to the LORD. The trespass offering gives liability a visible form before God.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that guilt is only an inward feeling: here it takes the visible form of an offering before the LORD.
THE ROOT
אָשָׁם
ʾāšām
GROWS FROM
א־ש־ם
ʾ-š-m
To incur guilt or be liable.
“trespass offering” in this verse is ʾāšām. Hebrew uses asham for both liability and the offering that answers it. The same root holds the condition and its ritual response together: guilt is not merely named; it is carried into an offering before the LORD.
ALSO GROWS
ʾāšēm: Guilty; liable.
אָשֵׁם
This form names the condition the offering addresses.
ʾašmāh: Guilt; offense.
אַשְׁמָה
This branch makes clear that asham carries the sense of guilt as well as the offering named for it.
מִזְבֵּחַ
mizbēaḥ
GROWS FROM
ז־ב־ח
z-b-ḥ
To slaughter or offer a sacrifice.
The altar’s name grows from the verb for slaughtering or sacrificing. English can make “altar” sound like a neutral object; the Hebrew keeps the act of sacrifice audible in the structure that receives the offering.
ALSO GROWS
zevaḥ: Sacrifice; sacrificial offering.
זֶבַח
This is the act or offering associated with the altar’s name.
zōvēaḥ: One who sacrifices or slaughters.
זֹבֵחַ
This form names the person performing the act the altar is built to receive.
THE PATTERN
Guilt is addressed through a visible act that joins acknowledgment to repair before God.
And he makes whole what he has missed from the set-apart thing, and adds its fifth upon it, and gives it to the priest; and the priest makes a covering for him with the ram of the guilt offering, and it is released to him.But if the man has no redeemer to whom the guilt is returned, let the guilt be returned to the LORD, even to the priest; beside the ram of the coverings, by which covering is made for him.Let go of your gift there, before the altar, and go your way. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and bring your gift.THE THREAD
Yet the LORD delighted to crush him, and to sicken him. When you make his living soul a guilt offering, he shall see his seed, and lengthen his days, and the delight of the LORD shall break through in his hand.The phrase “an offering for sin” translates the same Hebrew word, asham, used here for the trespass offering. Isaiah uses that word for a life made an asham, extending the ritual term beyond the portions burned on this altar.
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